Indian Head Mountain, Catskills

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
8/19/2017

Map: NYNJTC Catskills Map 141
Parking: Prediger Road
Directions: Red blazed Devil's Path. Turn right on blue blazed Jimmy Dolan Notch trail. Turn left on to red blazed Devil's Path. Join Overlook trail briefly. Turn left onto Devil's Path where it splits from the Overlook trail. Turn right on the Devil's Path where it intersects with the Jimmy Dolan Notch trail.

Our dogs are hacking less, but we decided to leave Trek home one more weekend to be safe. We had great weather, so we headed up to the Catskills to continue working on completing the Devil's Path. We decided to do a loop trail which goes over Indian Head Mountain. We took a look at a couple of websites and studied our map to determine if we should do the loop clockwise or counter clockwise. To use, it looked like counterclockwise was preferable, so that's the route we took.

Like last week, it had rained the day before we went hiking. So the trail were wet, wet, wet. I was covered in mud in no time. The temperature was nice today, but we were dripping sweat in no time due to the humidity. When we reached the intersection of the Jimmy Dolan Notch trail and the Devil's Path, we continued straight a ways, to see the view from the notch. There's a small herdpath that goes that way.

We had plenty of rock scrambling on the Devil's Path, but all of it was within the realm of what we feel comfortable doing. This section would have been hard for Trek, but I'm sure we could have found a way. These hikes on the Devil's Path make me think that there is no way I'd want to do a winter's round of the 3500 footers. Just imagine those rock scrambles covered in a layer of ice. Yikes!

View from the notch.

Typical Devil's Path terrain. Rocks!

Near the summit, the trail flattens out.

Approximate summit

Or was it this?

Taking a break to use our map to locate the mountains we can see.

A nicer view

My map reading skills need work. I couldn't figure out how that body of water tied to my map. We could find the communications tower on the map, but it took a long time for us to figure out that was behind it was the Hudson River and it was off the edge of our map. The small rivers we were looking for couldn't be seen from our view, and are actually in front of the tower. No wonder the river didn't look like the rivers in our map! Ha!

I like this photo because it shows scale much better than many of our photos. This descent was actually not too difficult. The roots were really strong and easy to hold onto as you lower yourself down the cliff.